The
Actors Studio Workshop production, May, 2005, directed by Carlin Glynn
From
left: Marni Nixon (
Peter
Clark (Patron), Maggi-Meg Reed (Léa)
CHÉRI
Music by Michael Dellaira
Libretto by Susan Yankowitz
PROGRAM
NOTE
CHÉRI is a musical love story in two acts based on
Colette’s 1921 novel. The story takes
place in the Parisian demi-monde just before the first
World War and tells of the love affair between Léa de Lonval, a 49 year old
ex-courtesan, and her lover of seven years, the 23 year old Chéri.
The relationship is doomed to fail of course, since
even in our day a love affair between a middle-aged woman and a young man is
assumed to be fleeting. And so, as
befits a respectable Parisian gentleman, Chéri is to be married to a woman his
own age, Edmée, the innocent young girl he does not love. To Chéri, the marriage will be one of
convenience; still the rake, he believes his affair with Léa will resume as soon
as his honeymoon is over. But to Léa,
Chéri’s marriage to Edmée will mark the end of her affair: for the first time
she becomes self-conscious about her age, and finally, inescapably, realizes
that Chéri is “the great love that comes only once.”
Chéri and Léa stand on opposite sides of the
invisible meridian that separates youth from what’s left of one’s life, and as
the musical begins, Léa has just begun to cross it. For though Chéri is the
story’s title, Léa is its principal character. Chéri is the agent through which Léa
confronts the inevitable: not just her loss of Chéri, but, more crucially, the
loss of her own youth and the sexual powers on which her identity has always
depended.
Musically, the
work defies easy categorization, containing as it does elements of both opera
and music-theater. As audiences have
begun to accept a blurring of categories (Sondheim is often performed in opera
houses, while La Boheme had a run on Broadway), questions as to what
differentiates opera from operetta, musical from music-theater, actors who sing
from singers who act, have become less and less relevant.
We first
conceived of CHÉRI as a work for the opera house, with full orchestra and
conservatory-trained voices. But then,
as a result of several readings of the work-in-progress, we began to wonder
whether the scale and style of CHÉRI were not just as appropriate to the
Broadway or off-Broadway stage (and audience) as to the opera house. When The Center for Contemporary Opera
proposed presenting back-to-back performances on the same evening of CHÉRI‘s
ACT I, first with a music-theater cast and after an intermission, with an
operatic cast we jumped at the chance.
Seeing the work
presented in this way made it clear to us that we wanted the best of each world
– the musical continuity and structure of opera with the intensity of character
and action which can only be achieved by the actor. What better place, then, to nurture and guide
a project like CHÉRI than The Actors Studio, which has shepherded us, under the
tutelage of Carlin Glynn, through two previous workshops? There we re-examined CHÉRI in detail, with
the goal of shaping it into a new form where music’s role is not only to
motivate both speech and song but is itself a motivated component of the dramatic
action.
And so we
present to you the completed version of our musical romance. Although it is a story of doomed love, the
lovers are not separated by race or class (South Pacific, West Side Story,
Carousel, La Traviata); political turmoil (Fidelio, Tosca, Aida); illness or
disability (La Boheme, Rent, Porgy & Bess); or jealousy (Otello, Cavalleria
Rusticana). The affair of Léa and Chéri is doomed because of age, alas. And the depredations of age are always with
us, not only when they are an impediment to love, but when we catch sight of ourselves
in the mirror or gaze into the faces of the next generation or the one that
gave birth to us. It will eternally be a
subject that stirs us to reflection, to poetry and to song.
--Michael
Dellaira (composer)
-- Susan Yankowitz (librettist)